Beginning in the early 1830s, the first “black women” American audiences saw on the American stage were minstrel “Negro wenches.” Using burned cork and greasepaint to blacken their skin, white men in their performances as black men and women became wildly popular in the mid-19th century. White men used crude drag along with the burned cork to mark black women as grotesque, loudmouthed, masculine and undeserving of the protections afforded to white “ladies” in American society.

Black women were ridiculed on the minstrel stage. Mammies were fat, monstrous, asexual and loyal caretakers of white children and neglectful of their own. Jezebel characters, often called “mulatto” or “yellow gal,” were fair-skinned, disloyal, greedy and hypersexual but not portrayed as beautiful. These blustering women yelled at their spouses and acted loud and inappropriately in otherwise genteel, public spaces to demonstrate all the ways that they were different from white women. The distance from and disdain for black women was reinforced by the fact that although white women were stage performers in the 19th century, it was thought to be too bawdy and low for them to blacken their skin for the minstrel stage.

These stereotypes served the needs of a slave regime that wanted to justify the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by painting them as Jezebels, like the biblical wanton woman whose promiscuity and controlling nature was her supposed undoing. The rapes of enslaved women could be laughed away on a minstrel stage that showed black women as temptresses who wanted nothing but money and sexual attention. The mammy stereotype painted over the ways in which black mothers were forced to raise and nurture white children to the detriment of their own families.

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